Developing a newsletter shouldn’t feel like a second job. You have actually already got sufficient on your plate managing content, customers, maybe even a permanent gig. I was reading among my favored e-mail newsletters when I scrolled to the bottom of the e-mail and saw the beehiiv logo for the first time. I clicked on it and quickly started tearing up. Does Beehiiv Have a Free Version…
I wasn’t certain why I felt so psychological.
Being a permanent maker is difficult. I’m usually obtaining pitched different tools and services that don’t appear to be worth my time.
I think I was psychological due to the fact that I spent the last 6 months checking out various e-mail and newsletter platforms to help build my newsletter. And to be reasonable, there are some great options for composing e-newsletters. But I could not discover one that made me give a precise “yes”.
The concern with lots of existing newsletter platforms is that they do not really feel creator-centered. I want a newsletter system that lets me totally customize my newsletter styles, makes it incredibly easy to write and send e-mails, and provides me tools that aid me evaluate metrics and obtain more clients.
I assume I’ve lastly located the best device.
However, I recognize beehiiv might not be for everyone. So let’s dive deep and see if it’s actually appropriate for you.
My individual experience with beehiiv
A few months back, I mistakenly stumbled across beehiiv. The funny tale is that I’ve watched for a modern e-newsletter system for quite time now. I have actually postponed hard when it pertained to finally launching my newsletter.
Initially, I tried Mailchimp. After that, a few various other indie systems. Then, Substack. And lastly, I ended up making use of beehiiv.
I make sure several e-newsletter creators respect popular newsletters with numerous customers– I recognize I do. The Morning Brew e-newsletter is one I looked up to a whole lot. They have great content, lots of clients, and a smart referral program that enables them to get back at much more clients.
So, I took place a search to identify just how these huge e-newsletters established their logistics. What platform do they utilize? How do they track the ROI of their newsletters? How do they obtain more customers? How do they produce a newsletter design that stays on-brand?
When I discovered beehiiv for the very first time, it seemed to respond to all of my concerns. I believed to myself, “damn individuals that developed this tool truly recognize e-newsletter development and development.” I questioned who these makers of beehiiv were.
So I mosted likely to LinkedIn, and saw that the co-founders were a few of the first marketing and growth workers at Morning Brew– my brain took off.
I understood this was mosting likely to be a various e-newsletter system. One that’s concentrated on developer growth.
Because, any kind of creator understands, you need growth to be able to make a living off of an e-newsletter. And locating the appropriate e-newsletter stack (that scales) typically implies using several different tools to aid attain one objective– one platform for your newsletter, one platform to generate income from, and one system to set up recommendations. It can obtain costly.
So when I figured out beehiiv did every one of these points in one system, and it was complimentary to start utilizing, it was a piece of cake to give it a try.
What is beehiiv?
beehiiv is an all-in-one system for newsletters. It’s a creator-friendly e-newsletter system that makes it simple to style, create, send, advertise, generate income from, and track the ROI of your newsletter.
Created by previous workers at the renowned e-newsletter firm Morning Brew, beehiiv intends to assist makers launch and monetize their own newsletter– taking lots of growth concepts from taking Morning Brew to over 4M customers.
In this short article, I’m mosting likely to explain my personal experience with beehiiv, the things I love (and hate) about it, all of it’s features, and why I chose to ultimately choose it as my e-newsletter platform of option.
beehiiv vs Substack
You might be asking, “isn’t there currently a platform for authors called Substack?”.
Yes, yes there is. Substack is a wonderful system made use of by thousands of independent authors. With Substack you obtain your own internet site and utilize the system as your all-in-one service for sending out e-mails (while developing an archive of previous problems).
What sets beehiiv apart is it’s devotion to growth. beehiiv enables you do to all things Substack can do, with the advantage of much better analytics, more layout flexibilty, and a referral program to urge your existing customers to get the word out.
beehiiv additionally provides you an internet site comparable to Substack. But, if you have your very own website currently, you can also use beehiiv’s sign-up installs (that’s what I make use of) to send your internet site customers right to your beehiiv email checklist. On the exact same token, you can incorporate beehiiv with a device like Performance to enable people to sign up for your e-newsletter directly from Twitter.
This provides you the flexibility to utilize different marketing networks to obtain your newsletter out right into the world, making beehiiv a great Substack choice.
How to begin utilizing beehiiv e-mail marketing software application.
Who is beehiiv for?
beehiiv is for the lean web content maker that desires a platform that enables them to send customized e-newsletters with or without requiring to have a web site.
The most effective newsletters have the right devices to build and scale their newsletters. beehiiv targets at providing you those tools.
If you’re an independent writer, media company, start-up, or web content designer, you must seriously thinking about checking out beehiiv. It’s entirely free to start and you just pay when you reach over 2,500 customers on your listing.
If you really end up having to pay for beehiiv it’s probably an excellent indication that people love reading your things.
beehiiv pricing plans
beehiiv offers 4 different pricing plans. You can check them out below.
The (complimentary) Launch plan offers you whatever you require to get started and expand your e-newsletter (as much as 2,500 subscribers).
The Scale plan ($ 34.40/month) provides you every little thing in the Launch plan with the enhancement the advertisement network, referral program, custom domain name, surveys, and accessibility to premium memberships. This is the plan I am on.
The Max plan ($ 76.80/month) provides you whatever in the Grow plan with addition of concern assistance and getting rid of the beehiiv branding.
Every one of these plans are rather charitable in my point of view.
As an example, if you have 100,000 subscribers you will certainly pay around $329 monthly. As opposed to some rivals, like Kit (previously ConvertKit), that would certainly charge $679 per month for the very same quantity– making beehiiv a great Kit option for several individuals.
I’m uncertain how the system business economics work with this, but beehiiv is definitely more affordable (presently) than what it can be.
Sign up for a free plan
The first step is to sign up for a free plan. You can do this by clicking on the “Begin trial” button on beehiiv’s web site.
The free plan will enable you to have up to 2,500 clients, give you access to web site hosting, an e-newsletter CMS, development personalization, analytics, external embed forms, and extra. It’s a really generous offering for those just beginning (or for those trying to find a brand-new platform to move to).
Onboarding
After creating an account, you’ll go through an onboarding process that will ask points like, “is this your first newsletter?”, “what other systems have you utilized?”, “do you have any kind of paying subscribers?”, and extra.
You’ll after that create a name and URL for your e-newsletter’s web site. On the free plan, your newsletter will certainly survive a beehiiv subdomain. So if your newsletter is called “Cooking Cakes,” your internet site link could be something like “baking-cakes. beehiiv.com”.
Throughout the onboarding procedure, you’ll also choose your brand colors and design to make certain your newsletter template looks right.
Navigating your control panel
Once you reach your primary dashboard, you’ll see every one of your analytics and settings.
You will certainly have outlined info on the number of sign-ups you’re obtaining and from where.
In the sidebar, you’ll see alternatives for “Beginning writing”, “Articles”, “Target market”, “Expand”, “Monetize”, “Layout” and” Examine”. And at the extremely lower you’ll see the settings alternative.
Dashboard is your major nerve center (screenshot above), Begin writing is where you create and publish newsletters, Articles is where you can see every one of your previous newsletter editions, Audience is where you can view who your clients are (and break them down into sections), Grow is where you have accessibility to a referral program (and growth tutorials) and boosts to run advertisements, Monetize is where you can access the beehiiv ad network and monetize your e-newsletter with advertisements, Layout is where you develop your e-newsletter landing page and message template, Assess is where you can see all your analytics, and Setups is where you can take care of all of your admin things.
Composing your newsletter
beehiiv makes it easy to start composing, with little to no friction. If you’re simply starting out, and have a concept you wish to write about, I suggest just mosting likely to the “Compose” area in the navbar and clicking “Start creating”.
You can fine-tune your template and styling later– focus on the content initially.
As you can see, beehiiv’s editor offers a clean and straightforward user interface for writing.
Once you start composing, you can enhance headings, include web links, and style your web content exactly how you such as.
beehiiv provides you lots of choices for various types of web content like videos, links, pictures, and more.
The group at beehiiv is additionally constantly launching item feature and updates so I’m sure there will certainly be a whole lot extra content features depending on when you read this.
Maximizing your settings and templates
As soon as you have a newsletter that’s ready to send out, it’s time to design your e-mail template and change some setups.
Here, you can update the name of your e-newsletter, provide it a summary, include your logo design, switch on or off a welcome e-mail to very first time subscribers, and much more.
Next, you can head over to the “Email Template” tab to make your design.
You can modify background colors, borders, spacing, font styles, picture layouts, and a lot more. I’m not going to undergo ever single thing you can maximize with your e-mail template because it’s a great deal. Just experiment with the platform for free and see it for yourself!
Crucial beehiiv features
beehiiv has lots of amazing features that make it a fantastic publishing platform for any type of newsletter designer.
Below are some of the necessary features you can find with beehiiv:.
E-newsletter builder
At its core, beehiiv is an e-newsletter posting platform. It makes it super very easy to create and send out e-mails. I mentioned above several of the things you can do with your settings and email design so I’ll spare you some extra reading.
The important things to note with beehiiv’s newsletter builder is that it has a really modern and minimalistic feel. It’s definitely one of the better email editors I’ve ever written in.
Site hosting
When you develop a beehiiv e-newsletter, every one of your newsletters (if you want) survive on a web site. Think of it as an internet site for your e-newsletter that’s a home to all of your previous issues of your e-newsletter, and a place where people can subscribe to your e-newsletter.
If you’re familiar with Substack, it’s pretty much comparable to that.
All plans, including the cost-free one, provide you a site. Nonetheless, the free plan locations your site on a beehiiv subdomain so if you want to add a customized domain name to remove all the beehiiv branding you’ll need to update to a paid plan.
Subscribe forms
Getting clients is necessary. Besides, that’s why you have a newsletter right?
With beehiiv, individuals can sign up for your e-newsletter straight from your beehiiv internet site or via embed types.
If you already have a site, and want individuals to sign up for your newsletter from your existing website, you’ll need to utilize an embed kind. This is what I make use of on this site (you can see the sign-up installed on the right hand column of this post if you scroll up).
With embed kinds, you have 3 various alternatives– a complete size, a repaired width, and a slim installed. I directly utilize the slim embed.
You can discover the code bit for these embeds in the “Subscribe Types” tab in your settings.
There’s likewise a choice for attribution tracking if you want to forward UTM criteria for tracking functions– pretty cool.
Nonetheless, there are a couple of features I want beehiiv had when it concerned subscribe features. I’m sure the team is working with updates for these, but I discussed a couple of worries I had in the benefits and drawbacks section listed below.
Referral program
One of the amazing things about beehiiv, that I have yet to see in any other e-newsletter system, is a service for developing a referral program.
You can urge existing customers on your checklist to forward your emails to buddies and colleagues and if they get other people to sign up for your checklist, you can award them. These benefits can be in whatever kind you desire. I’ve appear numerous newsletter business provide rewards in the form of merch and sticker labels.
This can seriously transform your customers into a word of mouth development engine for your newsletter– giving you another method for growing your email listing.
However, to get accessibility to the referral program feature, you’ll have to upgrade to an extra exceptional plan. I’ll review all the plans later on in this write-up.
Costs registrations
They say all you require to earn a living online is 1,000 true fans. Registration profits is absolutely a monster of its own. If you’re seeking a platform to monetize your newsletter, this is it.
With beehiiv, you can produce “premium” concerns of your newsletter that are just sent to paying subscribers. This can be very financially rewarding relying on what your e-newsletter needs to offer. For example, Trends.co is a prominent premium e-newsletter that creates millions in revenue a year merely by having pay-only newsletter web content.
Data analytics
One of things I love about beehiiv is exactly how clean and easy the analytics are. You get real-time date on exactly how your newsletter is doing, with open/click rates and customer count.
You get accessibility to all the metrics you require to obtain a bird-eye sight on how your e-newsletter is really doing. Logging right into your dashboard and seeing that customer count increase is absolutely a dopamine booster.
beehiiv benefits and drawbacks
Of course, with every platform, it has its pros and cons. Right here are a few of the pros and cons I have actually directly experienced while making use of beehiiv:
Pros of using beehiiv
Here are a few of the pros of using beehiiv as your e-newsletter system of option:
- Easy to establish and begin sending newsletters free of cost
- Clean and contemporary subscriber analytics
- Lots of flexibility with e-mail layouts.
- Referral program feature
- Site hosting
- Create costs options to monetize
- Surveys
To be sincere, I have not seen another e-newsletter system that has actually been able to package all of these features together so well.
Yet naturally, I do not want to be prejudiced so I’m mosting likely to point out some disadvantages.
Disadvantages of using beehiiv
Below are a few of the cons I have actually discovered while making use of beehiiv:.
- Limitations around integrating Webflow and Does Beehiiv Have a Free Version
- Limitations around adding personalized font styles
I use Webflow as my web site structure platform of option (I finished from WordPress and Squarespace a long period of time ago). I’m not mosting likely to go in way too much information why I love Webflow so much but you can review my Webflow review if you ‘d like to learn more.
Now, there truly is nothing else means I can incorporate beehiiv with my Webflow web site other than utilizing an iframe embed. I personally don’t like using iframe’s since they have a tendency to reduce my site a bit. Every single time a web page on my site (with a beehiiv installed) loads, the sign-up installed is the last thing to pack on the web page. It’s very visible when you’re on a sluggish web connection. However I can get around that.
The primary gripe I have is that I can’t utilize a normal Webflow type (which I like utilizing). There are means around this by using a tool like Zapier however that would certainly simply include additional costs that I do not require. To be honest, this is even more of a Webflow disadvantage over a beehiiv con yet I believed I would discuss it.
Besides that, I still think the pros much exceed the disadvantages right here. I’m additionally hopeful that Webflow will ultimately develop a much better method to incorporate with beehiiv.
Conclusion: Does Beehiiv Have a Free Version
Generally, beehiiv is a terrific remedy for any individual seeking to dive into the world of e-mail marketing and e-newsletters.
The capability of this e-newsletter platform much surpasses numerous that are currently on the market. And with a charitable free plan, you truly have absolutely nothing to shed for trying it.
The paid plans are additionally relatively affordable for what they are. Paying only $329/month to have 100,000 clients on your checklist is uncommon. If you were to have a newsletter with 100k subscribers, and all of these features beehiiv has, it could cost you well right into the thousands each month.
Anyways, I do not write review blog posts often. I just do when I in fact use the device myself and would advise it to a buddy.
I wish you located some clearness on whether or not beehiiv is a good platform for you.